Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  But as the hour grew later, his ebullience lessened, a slight thickness came into his speech, and gradually he came to an end of his stories. The last half hour of the flight he napped, while stewardesses tiptoed by outside the curtain.

  As for Evelyn, her apprehensions about the trip had washed away as the plane had lifted into the night sky, and now she found herself wondering if Wellington had any idea of the psychological advantages of this scheme. To get away from the stifling atmosphere of Eustace, the subterfuges, the invisible walls, the feeling of being forever locked in the same small tight maze; it was all rebuilding Evelyn’s spirit just as much as Bradford’s. And it didn’t matter that in reality they were carrying the invisible walls with them, the same subterfuges, the same maze. There was a feeling of escape, and for a little while that feeling would be enough, and when the weight did begin to bear down on her once again, as she knew it would, she’d be refreshed, she’d have had at least a small vacation.

  According to her watch it was one in the morning when the plane spiraled down over Paris toward Orly, but in Paris it was already tomorrow, seven o’clock, a cloudy sky graying reluctantly into morning.

  The VIP treatment continued here, where once again they by-passed the normal terminal, being taken to a special small lounge to wait for their luggage. Two or three Frenchmen, connected with the airline or the government (Evelyn never got it straight which), stopped in to say a few words and welcome them to France. Or perhaps to Paris. Or perhaps merely to Orly. In any event, Bradford thanked them, and they left, and now they were once more alone.

  Bradford was sitting on a strikingly red sofa, against which he looked very tired. “I’m ready for a long soak in a tub,” he said, and folded his hands over his stomach, fingers intertwined. It was a gesture she’d almost never seen him use, only at his most exhausted, and it made him look very old.

  A side door opened, and a man in a blue-gray uniform appeared, giving a two-finger salute to his cap. “Mrs. Evelyn Canby?” The French accent was almost nonexistent.

  “Yes?”

  “You are wanted on the telephone. In here.”

  Carrie? No, more likely Edward. “Thank you,” she said, and he stepped to one side to let her through.

  This room was smaller, an office dominated by a gray metal desk. She went over to pick up the telephone, and behind her the gray-uniformed man closed the connecting door. She turned in surprise, and he gave her another finger-to-cap salute and went diagonally across the small room and out the corridor door.

  She picked up the telephone, frowning at the closed connecting door, troubled at being separated from Bradford even at a time and place like this. She would tell whichever it was, Carrie or Edward, to hold on while she went over and re-opened the door. “Hello?”

  “Evelyn?” The voice was Wellington’s, and totally unexpected. “A situation has come up,” he said. “Are you there?”

  Still standing, she half-turned toward the desk, holding the receiver to her face with both hands. “Yes, of course. What’s the matter?”

  “Eddie, Jr. You know the organization he belongs to?”

  “I know he belongs to something or other, but I don’t know—”

  “Maoist. The Chinese have gotten to him, he’s told them our plans, he got everything from his father.”

  “How could he do such a—”

  “The best motives in the world,” Wellington said drily. “All the worst things are done for the best motives, I could tell you a lot about that. The point is, we have to change our plans. Don’t be surprised by the things that happen. Are you still there?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I can’t say too much on the phone. And neither can you, with Bradford right there.”

  She turned her head quickly, and looked at the closed door. “Wait,” she said.

  “Evelyn!”

  “I’ll be back!”

  She dropped the receiver to the desk, and ran to the connecting door. She pulled it open, and stepped through, and the room was empty.

  ii

  SHE TURNED BACK, STUNNED, not knowing how to say the words to Wellington, and the office door opened and two Chinese men came in. While the one went to the desk, picked up the phone, listened for just a second and then cradled the receiver, the other came toward her, holding up a brown cloth coat and saying, “Mrs. Canby, there is no time to waste.”

  Scream? They were coming toward her, their faces impersonal, businesslike. They had taken Bradford away.

  She still didn’t know whether or not she would scream—only a few mind-shattering seconds had gone by—when she saw another man in the corridor doorway. This one was Caucasian, elderly, with a thick black moustache and hornrimmed glasses. He wore a black homburg, a shabby black overcoat, and carried a worn brown briefcase of an old-fashioned kind. She was going to say something to him—ask him where Bradford was, or scream for help, or demand an explanation—when he said, with Bradford’s voice, “Come along, Evelyn, take off your coat.”

  “Bradford?” She stared at him, not believing the transformation, while the two men efficiently helped her off with her own coat and put the brown cloth one on in its place. He was so totally different, but very little had been done to him: a moustache quickly glued in place, a pair of glasses, a change of coat, the addition of the hat and briefcase. But the touches were just right, just enough to change the personality, the appearance, everything. He looked somehow shorter than Bradford Lockridge, and dumpier.

  They had the coat on her, and now one of them brought forth a pair of glasses, a soft brown felt hat, and a camera in its case with a long thong. “If you please, Mrs. Canby,” he said, like a hairdresser wanting her to turn her head. “They are clear lenses,” he said, holding the glasses out to her, and she took them from him and put them on. He nodded without smiling, put the camera strap over her head, and let the camera dangle at her waist. Then he handed her the hat, saying, “If you will put this on, please.”

  It was difficult without a mirror, particularly because her hands were shaking and her mind was alive with questions, but she did get the hat on one way or another, and then the Chinese said, “That’s very good. This way, please.”

  They walked down the deserted corridor, following the two Orientals, and Bradford said under his breath, “Damn clever, these Chinese. Eh?” He was no longer tired, and under the strange bushy moustache his mouth was fixed in a broad happy smile.

  Ahead was the open main terminal floor. Evelyn considered a dozen different things she might do when they got there—it didn’t matter now if she exposed the truth about herself to Bradford, if it resulted in rescuing him—but as the crowded terminal came closer she suddenly remembered one of the things Wellington had said to her on the phone just now: “Don’t be surprised by the things that happen.”

  Were those two Chinese? She stared at the backs of their heads, she thought back to the appearance of the Chinese agent who’d talked to her last night in Pennsylvania. But how could one tell? She was sure there were physical types in different Asian countries, just as there were in different European countries, but she didn’t know what they were. Perhaps someone from China would be able to tell just by looking at them whether these two were Chinese or Vietnamese, but Evelyn couldn’t.

  She had to make a guess, and she didn’t know which way to go. “Don’t be surprised by the things that happen.” If she shouted for help now, would she be ruining a scheme of Wellington’s? She remembered how the Chinese agent in the private road late one night had turned out to be one of Wellington’s men, how Robert and Howard’s discovery of the Chinese base of operations had turned up a secret operation of Wellington’s, how she’d stumbled on Wellington’s construction site, how even this trip to Paris had been kept from her by Wellington until after she’d already heard about it from Bradford.

  But if she guessed wrong, she and Bradford could wind up in Communist China.

  Would it be safer, then, to sound the alarm, to take the
chance on being wrong rather than permit the Chinese actually to get their hands on Bradford? But that way Bradford would find out what was going on, and this was far too public a place to keep him from making the sort of general announcement that was just exactly the kind of thing they were trying to avoid, the effect of which, for all intents and purposes, would be just the same as if he had gone to Red China.

  “Don’t be surprised by the things that happen.” Could she count on that? If only Wellington weren’t so compulsively secretive!

  The terminal floor. The Chinese—Vietnamese?—led the way, keeping a bit ahead so they weren’t obviously a group of four. Hundreds of people swirled and swarmed around them, all intent on their own concerns; she and Bradford might as well have been alone on a basketball court. Snatches of a dozen languages came to her ears, and the bits and pieces of English in the stew were the parts that sounded strange.

  A young Frenchman in a black turtleneck sweater bumped into Evelyn, murmured a quick apology, moved on.

  Ahead, the Chinese stopped, turned around. Bradford and Evelyn joined them, and one of them took a long flat envelope from his pocket. “Here are new passports,” he said, “and tickets for the fight to Stockholm. You will be met at the terminal there.”

  Bradford took the envelope. “Thank you. You won’t be coming with us?”

  “No.” A politely wistful smile. “We are most pleased to have met you, but we must leave you now. You will see that your flight does not leave for two hours, you will have plenty of time for a pleasant breakfast. Bon appetit.”

  “Join us,” Bradford said.

  “You will attract less attention without Oriental companions.”

  Hands were shaken all around—Evelyn numbly joined the ceremony—and the two men started off. Bradford was opening the envelope. One of the two men, as they moved past her to go back the way they’d come, murmured to her, “Everything is all right.” And then they were gone.

  iii

  HOW COULD THEY GET away with it? One of the most famous men on earth, walking amid a crowd, having breakfast in a public restaurant, being recognized by no one. The glasses and the moustache were almost no disguise at all, once you knew who it was you could see Bradford’s face clearly behind them, but for some reason they were just enough. That, and the fact that no one would expect Bradford Lockridge behind glasses and a moustache, no one would expect Bradford Lockridge eating a meal in a crowded airport restaurant, no one would expect Bradford Lockridge, seedily dressed and carrying a shabby briefcase, walking untended across an airport terminal floor.

  The absence of VIP treatment was in itself almost as much a disguise as the clothing and glasses and moustache. He can’t be anybody special, nobody’s treating him special.

  But even so, even if casual passersby didn’t realize they were in the presence of Bradford Lockridge, surely by now some sort of official search was under way. Bradford had to have been missed, people had to be looking for him. Or did they take it for granted he’d already been spirited out of the terminal, was the boldness of this move—altering his appearance very slightly and leaving him to roam at will within the terminal—enough to confound pursuit?

  Or did the lack of pursuit mean that Wellington was behind this after all, and not the Chinese?

  The one Oriental had said, “Everything is all right,” as they were leaving, and ever since she’d been trying to decide if that meant he was an agent of Wellington’s contacting her or simply the Chinese agent he appeared to be, reassuring her.

  It was easier so far to do nothing. In any event, their next destination was not Peking, but only Stockholm. There was time to consider the circumstantial evidence in favor of this being Wellington-inspired—the lack of pursuit, what the Oriental had said before leaving, what Wellington had said on the phone, and his pattern of overly compulsive secrecy—and in Stockholm she would either act or decide definitely to go along.

  In the meantime, they had absolutely no trouble with the papers given them by the Orientals. They boarded the Swedish airliner only fifteen minutes after it was due to take off and waited less than half an hour beyond that before it taxied down the final runway and lifted into the afternoon sky.

  How different this flight was. No special compartment to themselves, no hovering stewardesses, no separate entrance. Not even privacy; they were seated three abreast, with a stocky German woman in the window seat. Bradford was in the middle, and Evelyn was on the aisle.

  The German woman spent most of the trip digging into an enormous carpetbag on her lap, bringing out packages wrapped in white tissue paper, endlessly unwrapping them to reveal one bit of junk souvenir gimmickry after another, then endlessly re-wrapping and replacing in the carpetbag and bringing out yet another. The constant rustle and motion didn’t seem to bother Bradford, who slept the entire flight away, his earlier tiredness having returned, reinforced by the heavy breakfast he’d eaten at Orly. Evelyn was too nervous to sleep, even if the rustling of tissue paper didn’t make her tense and irritable, which it did.

  There was no trouble with the fake passports at the Stockholm end, either. And the two nondescript suitcases that went with the claimchecks the Orientals had given them contained only clothing, none of it of particularly good quality.

  Their names were different on the passports this time. (Another point for Wellington being behind it, rather than China?) No longer Ann Thornton and Marshall Allan, journalists, they were now father and daughter, Richard and Clara Curtis, Bradford’s occupation given as ‘businessman’, her own as ‘teacher’. Their ages had been altered, Bradford’s to fifty-nine, Evelyn’s to thirty-four. It pleased her that twelve years could be subtracted from Bradford’s age without exciting comment, but troubled her that seven years could be added to her own. Though part of that would be possible because of the clothing she was wearing, this coat and hat, and another part would be the result of the strain she was under. But normally she didn’t look thirty-four, did she? It was a silly thing to worry about, under the circumstances, but she couldn’t help it.

  Eleven A.M. in Stockholm, a sunless day in the middle of November. The cloth coat wasn’t warm enough as she walked across the windy open tarmac from plane to terminal, but inside it was warm, almost too warm, and she suddenly realized how tired she was. She’d lost a night somewhere. The clocks here said eleven, but according to her body clock, still attuned to the time at home, it was five o’clock in the morning and she hadn’t been to bed yet.

  Exhaustion now hit her like the effects of a drug. She went through customs in a haze, and when at last she and Bradford stood together, their luggage on the floor beside them, in the terminal waiting room, all she wanted from life was the chance to lie down somewhere and sleep.

  Bradford, who had slept the two hours of the flight up, plus the last half hour of the flight to Paris, seemed rested and ready to go now, looking around, saying, “I wonder what’s supposed to happen next?”

  Evelyn didn’t know, and at the moment she couldn’t care. She knew she should try to think, make a decision, come up with some action she could take, but she was just incapable of anything, neither thought nor action. She could only stand there as though she’d been clubbed.

  A man in a black chauffeur’s uniform approached, and touched his hat-brim with a two-finger salute, like the gray-uniformed man in Paris. Evelyn struggled to be awake, alert, ready to respond to danger. The man said, “Mr. Curtis?”

  Evelyn was thinking, no, that’s somebody else, when Bradford said, “That’s right,” and then she remembered the new names on their passports. She was Clara Curtis now, and Bradford was Richard Curtis.

  The man in the chauffeur’s uniform handed over an envelope, flat and white, legal size. “I was asked to give you this, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man left, and Bradford smiled sidelong at Evelyn. “All very mysterious,” he said. He opened the envelope, studied the contents, and said, “Well, it seems we’re going to Denmark.”

/>   “Denmark?” Anything would have been incomprehensible to her, in her current condition; Denmark was doubly incomprehensible.

  “Yes, we’re taking a flight to Copenhagen that leaves at one fifty-five.”

  “One fifty-five? That’s three hours from now!”

  “They’re giving us time for lunch,” he said, obviously pleased, then suddenly frowned at her. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m tired,” she said, feeling stupid and cranky. “I haven’t had any sleep, and I’m tired. I don’t want lunch, I want to go to bed.”

  “Didn’t you sleep on the plane?”

  The vision of the tissue-paper German woman rose in her head, but she knew that had only been a peripheral problem, that the main thing had been her continuing tension, so all she said was, “No, I haven’t managed to sleep at all.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can find you a room where you can rest a while. I’ll send someone for the terminal manager—”

  She put a hand on his arm as he was turning away, smiled at him and said, “You can’t do that. We aren’t VIPs now, remember?”

  “Oh.” Frowning, he considered the situation. “I’m afraid I don’t really know how to operate at this level.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “We’ll have some lunch, and I’ll feel better. Coffee, anyway.”

  Relieved, he said, “Of course. That’ll set you up. Come along, let’s see what sort of dining arrangements they have for us common people.”

  iv

  IT WAS BECOMING A nightmare, without even the blessing of sleep. First the flight east to Paris, the sudden change of plans, the shift to new identities and the shifting uncertain identities of the people suddenly in charge of them. And ever since, long pauses and apparently pointless traveling. The delay in Paris while they ate ‘breakfast’ though her body insisted it was only one o’clock in the morning and time not for meals but for sleep. Then the flight north to Stockholm, apparently unguarded and unsupervised, and the man in the chauffeur’s uniform, and the tickets to Copenhagen. As though they were on some sort of insane global scavenger hunt, following the clues toward . . .